By Ryan Whelan
If asked, what industry would you say found it acceptable for only 60 percent of its bills to be accurate and 70 percent of extra services paid for being undelivered? You would probably say none.
In fact, mobile service providers have been responsible for these type of shocking statistics for years now. I can’t even begin to think about the amount of excess money generated from inaccurate bills that has already been pocketed by these huge global organisations.
(Just maybe this is why the mobile industry has been slow to adopt real time billing, as this would significantly cut the substantial ‘revenue’ earned from inaccurate bills...)
What can we do about it? Effectively, nothing! Unless you make an accurate record of every phone call you place and every text message you send and then measure it against your monthly itemised bill. Even then, trying to challenge an organisation of this size will probably only end in misery.
Paying for services we haven’t received or been able to use is another big problem. Due to the relative low cost of these individual services, many customers who have failed to receive what they paid for simply cannot be bothered to go through the rigmarole of spending an hour on the phone to try and claim back 70 pence. Especially as the process of such a simple refund has been made incredibly complex – I wonder why?
There is a common misconception that mobile content is poor and limited. On the contrary, the mobile internet has the ability to flourish into an even more powerful entity than its elder, more familiar cousin. However, service providers are not doing enough to ensure the mobile internet is delivered to a high quality and this is part of the reason it has been slow to take off. The iPhone will be introduced later this year with a barrage of new functions, but how many of these will we be able to use on UK networks?
The problem is that devices currently available on UK networks are far more advanced than the networks themselves are capable of handling, which leads to frustration amongst mobile users. Why do service providers have difficulties delivering simple content to our mobiles? Because they fail to accurately test and monitor these processes across all devices on their networks before implementing them.
There is only one winner in this whole saga: service providers – and this despite the fact they seem incapable of keeping up with advances in technology. Having failed to implement 3G at an acceptable level – effectively killing the market – they are about to do the same with the mobile internet.
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